Allegheny Almanac

Finding My Distance, by Julia Wendell: a year in the life of a three-day event rider

Finding My Distance: a year in the life of a three-day event rider

by Julia Wendell

399 pages, with glossary of equine terms

2009 Galileo Books

Zen And The Art Of

Horse Maintenance

book review by Chris Lareau

Thirty-five years ago, a philosopher got down to the nitty-gritty of mechanics and wrote "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values." The unusual book by Robert Pirsig was written as a novel but was basically a memoir that sold five million copies.

Wendell's unusual memoir published this year is also an inquiry, but this time the narrative is delivered through the filter of an accomplished poet and instead of detailing the minutiae of two-wheeled rockets it is about the four-legged variety. The juxtaposition of learned literature and nuts-and-bolts by Pirsig now has an addition to this type of genre. Rather than contemplating something as elusive as Truth, Wendell picks one aspect of life, Victory (paradoxically, a word that never appears in the book), and gives us its anatomical details as perhaps no one but a poet could ever do.

Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, by Tim Gay

 book review by Chris Lareau     

          Rebel With A Cause

    Author Tim Gay is a member of the Warren Area High School Class of 1972. 314 pages, The Lyons Press, $16.95  This book was originally released as a hardcover in 2005 by the University of Nebraska Press. Currently it is available at Amazon.com through The Lyons Press, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press. Photo: Library of Congress

History, it has been said, is written by the winners.

This may explain why you probably never heard of Tristram Speaker, who will forever hold the all-time record for unassisted double plays. Speaker lived from 1888 to 1958 and played for the world champion Red Sox and the world champion Cleveland Indians, with a lifetime batting average of 344. With the possible exception of Willie Mays, Tris Speaker was arguably the greatest center fielder of all time. At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, he is at least acknowledged as the "Greatest centrefielder of his day."

Corruption in baseball, which takes up quite a bit of this book, was so bad in the early 20th century that one wonders if the national pastime of betting was what made baseball so popular or if baseball was invented just to give gamblers something to wager on. If you read between the lines in Gay's flawlessly expressed prose, there was probably more money bet on games than the games actually earned. Those smart enough to pick the winners may have made a fortune and those smart enough to fix games probably made even more.

When the corruption bubble burst, the stock of Tris Speaker, the highest paid athlete in the country, plummeted. So did his place in sports history.

Until now, of course, in this biography by Warren, PA native Timothy Michael Gay III who, while visiting the ballplayer's gravesite in Hubbard, Texas, found that people there didn't even know who Tristram Speaker was.

Roger Tory Peterson, the book

Birdwatcher
The Life of Roger Tory Peterson
by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal

437 pages, $29.95
The Lyons Press, an imprint of the Globe Pequot Press

with photos and index
Published May 2008

about Roger Tory Peterson

Author Rosenthal talked about her book Wednesday night at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, NY.

Classmates at Jamestown High School might not have thought of Roger Tory Peterson as the most popular kid in school. He came from a poor Swedish family and showed up late for class, on the days he wasn't completely truant which was frequently the case. When he did attend, he usually fell asleep at his desk. He left school as soon as he could at age 16 and got a job working in a furniture factory.